


Lives for the Living

by Papook



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Mand'alor Jango Fett, Mandalorian Jango Fett, Non-Jedi Force User (Star Wars), flowers as a metaphor for a lot of things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:42:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28430328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papook/pseuds/Papook
Summary: This was a summons he would not answer in any other circumstance, nor for any other being. But when Taastama called, Jango was honor bound to answer.
Relationships: Jango Fett & OFC, Jango Fett & Satine Kryze
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	Lives for the Living

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [PrimaryBufferPanel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenLune/pseuds/Primarybufferpanel) for looking this over and providing essential feedback. Without her help getting me unstuck I would still be staring at my Google Doc and crying.
> 
> Happy New Year, friends. May the coming year be full of many more poppies than deserts for all of us.

This was a summons he would not answer in any other circumstance, nor for any other being. But when Taastama called, Jango was honor bound to answer. 

He did not want to be here. He did not want to see Mandalore again, to break open old scars with fresh hurts and shame. His grief for all that was lost was a heavy, bitter thing, clawing at his ribs and strangling his breath. He had not returned to Mandalore, despite his restored freedom, since his people had chosen to abandon the old ways, to break with their history. He had not been able to bear how they had tossed his father’s legacy aside, how they had chosen to make themselves so much less than they could be and thus had lost so much of what they were. 

Had not been able to bear how he loved them anyway.

But Taastama had saved him, had freed him, and so he would come when she called and honor his debt.

She had found him, after Galidraan and the slaughter of his people, had found the slavers holding him captive and had torn through collars and slavers both. Had found him after the fighting as he lay on the deck, and had staunched his blood and bound his wounds. He owed her his life thrice over.

It still stung, to be so indebted to one who used the Force, even though she claimed to have nothing to do with the _jetii._ It stung that she had used the Force to heal him when he lay dying on the floor of a slaver’s ship, that the only reason he was alive was because of the power that had killed his people. It seemed wrong, warping the fabric of what he knew, that this power which had decimated Mandalore had saved his life. 

He still did not understand why she had saved him, why she had tended to him afterward, for though his wounds were healed his strength was slow to return. _Why are you doing this,_ he had snapped one night, unnerved by her care.

_Because there is a need,_ she had said, watching him with eyes too deep and knowing. _Because so many needs are beyond my power to help, and I cannot stand by when there is a need I am able to meet. Because this is something I can_ **_do_** _._

He had turned away in anger, though he knew in truth that it was shame. He, too, was needed by his people, but he was not heeding that call.

She had stayed, though, stayed with him, drawing words, stories, thoughts from him like poison from a wound. He had told her, quietly, bitterly, in the depths of a night when sleep eluded him, why he hated the Force, why fury flared in his chest at the thought of what it had taken from him, from his people and his planet.

_What is the desert like, on Mandalore?_ she had asked, soft and searching.

_Harsh,_ he had thought, _and endless. A wasteland, a waste of life and a wasted space. A tragedy._

He was a farmer, once. Before he was anything, he was a farmer. The sterile sands of Mandalore will always hurt.

_Lost_ , he had told her, this bronze-dark stranger with music in her voice and eternity in her eyes. _Lost, just like the rest of Mandalore._

*****

The day he left her, clothed and provisioned and healed by her hand, she had asked him one more question.

_Would you go back, if the desert bloomed again?_

He had laughed, one sharp bark. _It won't,_ he had said. _It's dead_. 

_I can't,_ he had thought, and left.

He had run from her, had tried to run from her question as well. But it crept through his dreams, twined around his bones, lingered in his lungs and the corners of his ship.

_Would you go back, if the desert bloomed again?_

_No,_ he thinks, and means _I wish I could see it._

*****

And yet, he is here, spiraling down to a place he had thought he would never return to, to answer a debt that he thinks he will never be able to fully repay. 

He lands in the desert wasteland of Mandalore just as the sun spills over the horizon. Taastama is standing, waiting for him on the bare plain. Dawn breaks, shimmers over the sand, kindles the golden petals of a poppy like a flare.

A poppy.

There are poppies blooming in the desert, a swath of brilliant flowers stretching to the horizon.

A small eternity spins by as he battles to reconcile this vision with the desolation of his memories. It is unimaginable. It cannot be real.

_Would you go back, if the desert bloomed again?_

He stumbles down the ship ramp, disbelief heavy on his tongue. Falls to his knees, removes a glove. Strokes the silken petals with trembling fingers. Real. The flower is real, not a hope or a wish or a dream, but a delicate impossible reality.

Jango strips off his helmet and weeps, his farmer roots and his warrior heart breaking with painful joy.

Taastama steps up behind him and rests a hand on his armored shoulder. _Your planet burned under the weight of the Force, once, and cries because of it still. It was cruel, and wrong, and I cannot stand by while there is a need that I may meet, a sorrow I may soften. It is only just that the Force help the desert it created to bloom again._

He turns to her, still weeping, still on his knees, grabs her hand and presses his forehead to her knuckles. _Thank you. Thank you. My loyalty and thanks to you and your line forevermore. Mandalore owes you a debt we can never repay._

_And what of the Mand’alor?_ she asks, gentle and relentless as the dawn. He shakes his head. He is not the Mand’alor, cannot be the Mand’alor. _Jango,_ she says softly, _you will never be happy if you turn away from where you know you are needed._

She turns her hand to cup his wet cheek and kneels in front of him. _We cannot turn back time, nor unmake the wounds of the past, but we can march forward to meet the future, and in moving to help others, we may shed our own sorrow and regret. There is healing to be found in striving for something better, Jan'ika,_ she says, _and you do not deserve to drown in regret any more than your home deserved to be made barren._

She leans her forehead against his. _Please, dearheart, march forward to meet the future and work to make it one such that you do not have to drown in regret. Please make a future where you can be happy._

He is tired, and afraid, and ashamed. He does not want to be the king who is tasked with revitalizing a fading people, for it is a thankless, painful task. 

But he is kneeling in a field of impossible wildflowers with an equally impossible woman, so what can he say but _yes?_

He closes his eyes, still weeping. _What do I do?_ It is a child's cry, a desperate plea for comfort and direction, and in any other circumstance he would never show such a weakness, but this gift, this kindness, this care, has shattered him, broken him open, and the burden he must shoulder is so heavy.

He hears the wry smile in her voice when she responds. _Make peace with a pacifist._

He shakes his head, eyes still closed and forehead pressed to hers. _I can't. She is killing our culture._

_You must,_ comes the gentle rebuke.

_I can't—_

_Mand'alor._ Taastama sits back on her heels and he opens his eyes. She holds both of his hands. _A culture means nothing if there are no people alive to live it. Whatever else she has done, Satine is trying to keep your people alive. Culture can be revived. The dead cannot._

She turns his hand, presses his palm to the living earth. _I can make the desert bloom, Jango Fett. But it is_ **_you_ ** _who can create a future where it will continue to thrive._

He looks down, touches a poppy. _Why are you doing this?_ He sounds lost even to his own ears.

_Because you told me there was a need_ , she says simply. _Because this is something I can do._

_That's all?_ He cannot quite believe that there is not another reason, though all that he has seen of Taastama tells him that she speaks truthfully.

_Well_ , she says thoughtfully, _I like flowers_.

*****

_Did you do this?_ Satine Kryze asks, touches a poppy, the first time they meet under Taastama's watchful eye. Distrust is heavy in her gaze.

_No_ , Jango says, offering up his honesty as the only bargaining chip he has. _No. It was a gift that I am trying to be worthy of._

He has surprised her, he can tell. She looks at him again, still distrusting, but just enough differently that he thinks there may be hope for this fool's errand he has pressed upon his own shoulders.

*****

Jango meets with Satine. It is not comfortable, not at first. They seem too different, diametrically opposed in every way, except for how they love their people. But they try, and they keep trying. They learn to communicate, in trickles and spurts and floods, and mutual respect begins to bloom along with the wasteland.

Death Watch attacks. Satine and Jango are united in their anger, but now Jango comprehends the circularity of the fight, and Satine recognizes people desperate to hang on to part of their heritage, even if they are going about it in the worst way. They agree that Death Watch needs to be stopped, needs to be disbanded.

Taastama watches them argue over how to do so, as she has watched so many arguments before. Satine does not want to fight. Jango thinks that it is the only way to get rid of the cult.

_You cannot talk down zealots, Satine,_ Taastama interrupts. And _if you kill them you just make them martyrs, Jango._

_Well what can we do, then?_ Jango snarls.

_It is a simple matter of resource allocation,_ she says, gesturing at the land around them. _If you wish to get rid of Death Watch, starve it. Take what feeds it. It is an ideology upheld by people. Take away the people, give them something else to rally to, to uphold, and the ideology dies._

She reaches up, pulls out the flower she had tucked in her hair, holds it out to them. _So. Give them their Mand'alor._

Jango and Satine look at each other, uncertain. _Can we…?_ He asks. Have they come to understand each other well enough, respect each other enough, find common ground enough that this could work? Can he be a warrior king of a peaceful people?

He was a slave. He understands, now, why Satine wants to give her people, _their_ people, the chance to choose their path, because he had his choices taken from him. But he thinks—he hopes—that she too has come to see why some people will choose the warrior path, why that must be allowed as a choice as well.

He is asking _are we ready._ He is asking _is it time._ He is asking _will we stand together._ He is asking _can I give our people a choice._

Satine is still the acknowledged leader of their people, and while he is Mand'alor by right he is unacknowledged. But if Satine acknowledges him, gives him legitimacy…

He reaches out. Takes the flower.

Satine looks very young, right now. Young and scared and torn.

Jango kneels next to her, presses the brilliant poppy into her hands, cradles them, both their hands smeared with the dirt of a living planet long thought dead. _Satine._ He braces himself, and meets her eyes. _Naak’jorur. Let me protect your hard-won peace._

She looks at their hands, at the dirt, at the miracle of the flower. She turns her hand, clasps the blossom between her own pale palm and Jango's broad scarred hand, holds tight. She breathes deep, tasting the scent of earth and green things and living waters, of life renewed on a barren planet. _Cuun oyay par Mandalor,_ she says. _Our lives for Mandalore._

(Taastama kneels beside them, strange catalyst of an unlooked for future, and cups her hands around their clasped grasp. _Your lives,_ she says gently, _for the living._ )

*****

It is not an easy road, reconciling the past with the future. But they walk it together, united in their love for their people and their determination to see the planet live again. The warriors flock to their _Mand'alor_ , and Death Watch is left a frail shell. Jango demands honor of his fighters, an oath to protect, and polices them, weeds out those that are using their skills to harm. Satine stands firm in her convictions of _choice_ , and Jango stands with her. 

Taastama works tirelessly at healing the land. Acre by acre she reclaims the desert, months and months of cleansing, planting, seeding the land and seeding the clouds. Life begins to ripple out from her handmade oases.

Hope blossoms, poppy-bright.

*****

Five years after Taastama called Jango home, he opens Sundari's dome.

He stands with Satine, his friend, his counterbalance, his partner, and clasps her hand as they watch their people surge out into the sunlight. There is grassland as far as the eye can see, shimmering with color, singing in the wind. The poppies toss their brilliant heads.

_Why did you do this?_ He asks again, the same question he has asked over and over. Taastama, standing beside him, smiles.

_Sa sarad,_ she answers. _There has been plenty of war, my friends. I hoped it might finally be time for flowers._

_I don't understand you,_ he says fondly, and Satine throws her head back and laughs.

_Yes you do, ad'ika,_ Taastama says. _We do it because we_ **_can._ **She cups his cheek, kisses his forehead. Does the same to Satine, as a mother to her children, then leaps lightly into the grass and chases the happiness on the breeze.

He leans into Satine, bracing each other against the rush of wind, of hope.

They watch Taastama, watch their people, watch their future unfold. Jango bends down, picks a poppy, twirls the crisp stem between his fingers. _Cuun oyay par Mandalor,_ he murmurs.

_Our lives,_ Satine replies, with a squeeze to his hand, _for our living._

**Author's Note:**

> Mando'a translations:
> 
> Jetii: Jedi  
> Mand'alor: sole ruler  
> Naak'jorur: "Peace-bringer", a title given to Satine by the New Mandalorian faction (credit to Bee in the Discord for coming up with it, thanks Bee!)  
> Cuun oyay par Mandalor: our lives for Mandalore  
> Sa sarad: "as flowers", a reference to the epitaph of the tomb of the First Mand'alor. (This is possibly canon, but I have lost all ability to differentiate canon from fanon and thus I am going to credit it to Blue_Sunshine's Desert Storm series, which is where I think I first encountered it.)  
> Ad'ika: little one


End file.
